Sarah Kliff has a great piece about reactions to the new calorie information found on the food at McDonald’s. This is my favorite quote, but there were a bunch I considered posting here:

I did find one customer who had noticed the calorie labels: Dick Nigon of Sterling, Va. He and his wife, Lea, had stopped by McDonald’s after seeing an exhibit at the Renwick Gallery. Dick had ordered for the couple, noticed the calorie labels and liked them.

“I like that you have the information before you order,” he told me, when I asked about the labels. “It’s better than some kind of government health mandate in Obamacare.”

I told him that the calorie labels were, in fact, a government health mandate in Obamacare.

“Well that changes things a bit,” he responded. “I thought this was more of a voluntary sort of thing. Now I’m not quite sure how I feel about it.”

I like this quote so much not only because it demonstrates what we all already know about Obamacare, the role of government, and people’s perceptions of those things, but also because Jonathan Bernstein ran with it to talk about the political process itself:

[It’s] a reminder of how difficult it is for anyone to talk about “Obamacare” as a particular thing because the ACA just contains so many different, and in many cases largely unrelated, pieces. It’s also a reminder that one of the outdated bits of “I’m Just a Bill” is the idea that a “bill” is one specific idea written by one Member of Congress in response to one problem. Most things nowadays that pass Congress do so as part of larger, omnibus bills which contain many different bills, many of which began life as individual measures. Most of these bills/provisions (or whatever we should call them) never receive separate votes on the House or Senate floor, or even in committee. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but good or bad it’s just how Congress does business.